Purchasers of legal tech, don’t get too creative: Buy “configurable” tech, not “customizable”
“My cousin Cleatus says he’ll get it running in a year or two, just as soon as he’s done customizing it.”
My uncle Chuck had a ski boat. He entrusted it to my Dad because he was tired of taking care of it. In exchange for maintaining the boat, my Dad could use it all he wanted.
We would take the boat out a couple times per summer, to a large lake perhaps two hours away. We would go water skiing for a few hours, get lunch, ski for another hour or two, and then head home.
Once we got home, we had to clean it and store the boat, which was a pain and took hours.
Another thing: For a “free” boat, it sure was costly. It consumed a lot of gasoline, and was expensive to store and maintain.
It was also old and burned a lot of oil. Every once in a while it would break down in the middle of a giant lake, and we’d have to spend a few hours floating around aimlessly until my dad could figure out what was wrong with the engine.
Overall, as many others have observed, having a boat was an expensive, high-maintenance proposition that brings way more responsibility than you might think.
Well, a lot of legal technology is the same way. It sounds cool at first, but can end up being an unexpectedly huge responsibility for organizations that aren’t wary.
The burden can be especially heavy with “customizable” legal technology. “Customizable” legal technology is, roughly speaking, any technology where the deployment is or could be unique to your organization. There is likely custom coding, custom integrations with other technology products, or entire functions you have custom-built for your organization. Although there may be other companies besides yours using the software, no other company using this software will have the exact same combinations of screens, buttons, functionalities, etc., that you have.
“Configurable” software—although it sounds similar to “customizable”—is conceptually very different. Nobody is writing any custom code. Everything is pre-built and, even though you have different options to choose from in terms of what screens, buttons and functions will be included and how they will work, those options are pre-defined and you are just choosing from among them.
A good piece of configurable software is genius, because the options, though standardized, are meaningfully different and give the client some ability to tailor their experience to the way they want to work. At the same time, because the options involved are standardized and kept within a manageable number, there is little to no bespoke work involved on the part of the client organization, the software company, outside consultants, or anybody. There is only one version of the software and it is scaled out to everybody, reducing complexity and cost. The reduction in complexity also allows the software company to concentrate on a long-term strategic vision that is going to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of clients, rather than getting distracted by the idiosyncratic needs of individual clients that do not scale and will benefit only them. Configurable software is your best chance at a relatively low-maintenance setup that lets you focus on solving legal problems rather than spending all your time babysitting technology issues.
In contrast, customizable software is more like my uncle Chuck’s boat. Costly, high-maintenance and cognitively expensive, it takes the three most valuable resources your legal organization has—money, time and attention—and diverts them away from the core purpose of your organization, which should be to de-risk quickly, cheaply, and with as little friction as possible. Instead of focusing on legal problems and de-risking, your people are now ensnarled in a quagmire of technology and process issues that could have been avoided entirely if your organization hadn’t tried to customize its experience.
The people selling customization will tell you different. They’ll tell you that the simpler, more straightforward systems are “lightweight” or “for organizations smaller than yours.” You don’t want a Honda Accord—do you? Nah, a big, important legal organization like yours needs a Cadillac.
You see, you’re not just any legal organization. You’re a very special one. An important one, with unique needs that others don’t have. Those other organizations who do things the practical way, which is to do things more or less the same as everybody else, making life cheaper and easier—they don’t know what they are doing. Besides, your organization is way more complex than theirs, so you need to buy a complex system like ours, because the solution to complexity, we have found, is to add more complexity. Get it?
Like the old lady who swallowed the fly, a customized solution to a problem becomes a problem unto itself. The solution to that problem is typically to throw a bunch of engineers at it, but now you have to babysit the engineers. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can ever get rid of those engineers once they are “done.” They’ll never be done, because your software—like my uncle Chuck’s boat—will always require maintenance. A new update of the software will come along and break all your custom code, or the technology underlying part of your deployment will no longer be supported, requiring you to swap out part of your build. If you are not careful, your organization could end up with a small army of engineers, project managers, business analysts, and other folks whose only raison d’etre is to spend all day putting out IT fires and keeping the wheels from flying off the train.
Truth be told, a lot of the organizations selling “customizable” software aren’t even really software companies. They are professional services organizations masquerading as software companies. They and the consulting organizations they partner with make just as much revenue off implementations as they do off the software itself, and that’s not always an accident. By steering clients into needlessly complicated software and distracting them with 100s of bells and whistles and other bright, shiny objects—many of which may never be used, not even once, not even by one client-- they take their unsuspecting victims on what I would call a “customization Odyssey”: A multiyear journey where the client organization spends hundreds of hours on Dilbert-esque Zoom calls about scintillating issues like whether you want the purple button on the right side of the screen or the left. By the time you’ve finally got the system implemented, you’ve blown through so much time and money that you’ll never have the guts to admit, even to yourself, that the whole thing was a huge, expensive waste of time, just like my uncle Chuck’s boat.
Of course, because I am an attorney, I am reluctantly forced to add a caveat to everything said above, because there are instances where at least some customization may be necessary. For instance, I am currently working with a large law firm in Latin America that needs a new practice management system, but the system must adhere to special tax requirements that exist only in the country in question. Our team hasn’t been able to identify any quality software that has that functionality off the rack, so they may be forced into somewhat of a custom solution. But even then, when some customization is necessary, I would minimize or eliminate customizations that aren’t actually necessary. Instead, go with a “vanilla” implementation and go with an approach that is the same as the median client using the software platform in question. Life is just easier that way.
In conclusion, don’t be creative.
Don’t be a special snowflake.
Keep it simple, put in a decent system, and move on.
If you want to know more, buy my book, How to Buy Legal Technology that Works. Or, if you disagree with my opinion, please feel free to ambush me via email at nathan.cemenska@forthright-consulting.com or via LinkedIn.